Around the time a quiz show host decides to resign from her job, a kid gets frustrated with his lack of sunglasses. The host is tired of her current job. The kid wants to avoid getting the sun in his eyes. The host goes to her company; the kid heads to his dad. The kid gets his father’s sunglasses and the host, after leaving her job, dreams of a more meaningful life dealing in visuals. She is warned about the potential tackiness and over-poeticization of her project, but she has been in the media business long enough to have a plan.
“I’ll be filming raw scenes,” she says, “to contrast the dreamy images.”
The kid, Yousef Yacoubi, and the former TV game host, Eveline, will meet in the pivotal scene of Sam de Jong’s Met Mes (With A Knife in English), which is premiering at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. A lot more festivals would love the film, as will European audiences across ages. They might just need to get past the lively weirdness of the first act.
At the meeting between the two protagonists, the boy asks Eveline for her phone and pretends to make a phone call to his family. But while she’s focused on the boy, his friend and accomplice grabs the case containing her camera. Yousef hands over the phone; his friend flees with the case. The lady is distraught when she discovers the theft. Off she goes to file an insurance claim. Unfortunately, they can’t help her because, according to the company’s terms, the incident was caused by her negligence.
Stung by the whole thing, she goes to the police and while getting questioned, her story acquires one important detail that wasn’t present at the scene of the theft: the boy who stole from her, she says, had a knife. The complexion of the incident is immediately altered. The violence implied by the added detail is accepted as truth.
Away from the state’s legal structure, Yousef, whose father’s sunglasses fail to receive the approval he craves from his friends, exchanges the camera for a pair of cooler sunglasses. This pair has a scratched left lens. Asked why the scratch, the vendor says, everybody’s damaged. Maybe that’s easy to agree with but what does that have to do with anything?
Well, that response is in the spirit of Met Mes, which, until the moment a knife is mentioned during Eveline’s questioning, talks, walks, and looks like a frivolous comedy, replete with colours, quirky camera movements, surreal elements, and some weird dialogue. Most of those features remain post-knife but become much more restrained. And as with the police, the viewer pays closer attention to this straightforward but complex story as the ambient temperature of the film goes up a few notches.
Once again, the film’s main characters stay away from each other as was the case at the start—but they will have to meet again. And the consequences may be different this time.
De Jong’s moral insight, which his initially boisterous method to a certain extent obscures, relates to the life-changing consequences of what, without foresight, appears to be really small details. This remarkable Dutch film doesn’t preach but lurking within it is a lesson in human, class, and, possibly, European race relations.
Cast: Hadewych Minis, Shahine El-Hamus, Gijs Naber, Nils Verkooijen
Director, Writer: Sam de Jong
Production Company: Lemming Film (Netherlands)
Director of Photography: Emo Weemhoff
Distributor: Gusto Entertainment
Duration: 78 minutes
In Dutch
